The man who shot bin Laden

Navy SEAL who killed terror kingpin tells story for 1st time

Published: 02/12/2013 at 9:52 AM

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(ESQUIRE) The reason we knew this was a special mission, the Shooter said as our interviews about the bin Laden operation began, is because we'd just finished an Afghanistan deployment and were on a training trip, diving in Miami, when a few of us got recalled to the Command in Virginia Beach. Another SEAL Team 6 team was on official standby—normally that's the team that blows out for a contingency operation.

But they were not chosen, to better cloak what was going to happen.

There was so much going on—the Libya thing, the Arab Spring. We knew something good was going to go down. We didn't know how good.